Peppermints
The truth is, people are stupid. People seek advice from the most unlikely of sources when they’re desperate. Churches, spiritual leaders, rock stars, support groups, newspaper horoscopes, you name it. While I really don’t think anyone out there should listen to me, I’ve got three sparkling gems of wisdom I want to share with you for the benefit of humankind. Or something. They go like this:
If you’re a parent, no matter how noble your intentions, you will end up taking the blame for a fucked up life that isn’t your own.
If you’re a hooker, carrying breath mints isn’t common courtesy as much as it’s self-preservation.
If you’re human, don’t fall in love.
Well, contrary to popular belief both parents and hookers are generally human, so that last part pretty much applies across the board. We’ll get round to that. First of all, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Brendon Urie and I’m a prostitute.
Okay, I fucked that up. That’s the support group angle I was trying very hard to avoid, the kind of introduction that leaves a chorus of ““Hello Brendon” echoing in your head and let’s face it, this here isn’t Sexaholics Anonymous.
This is neither a fairytale nor a lifetime movie, I’m not Julia fucking Roberts and I’m not an innocent victim of cruel circumstance. This is my story and if you don’t like it, you can suck my nine inch dick.
If you’re still with me at this point, the part about the nine inch dick? Not strictly true. I’m not a compulsive liar or anything, but yeah, I’m good at it. You could say it’s second nature. Maybe that’s my starting point. It also brings us back to the part about parents. Go figure.
The main problem was I used to be Mormon and a queer and that’s quite simply not a winning combination.
While Mormon culture on the whole is inclusive and communal and nowhere near as bad as some folks would have you believe, the gay thing isn’t much fun.
It’s not that they actually deny guys fucking guys exist, that you do get people who are born with some enthusiasm for a dick that isn’t their own.
It’s just they think you can change that. If that was possible, you would not be reading this and I might have been infinitely better off.
The truth is, I believed. No really. I had faith. This was adults talking, people I’d only ever experienced as loving and truthful and right.
After I’d made out with my best friend behind a tree at a church picnic, I knew I was a lost cause, pretty much.
For the poetic irony: the other kid was the Minister’s son. I was so doomed it really didn’t seem funny at the time. I was convinced we were going to hell. I was fourteen years old and facing an existential crisis here. When I mentioned that to Bert the make-out buddy, he fucking laughed in my face and because I was one seriously fucked up kid that made me feel strangely better about the situation.
Bert didn’t give a shit about the book. Bert didn’t give a flying fuck about the good Lord above and all the minions spreading his word in the world below.
Bert was forced to sing in the church choir but secretly played Nirvana songs in his parents’ basement. Bert would be at services and prayer groups cause he wasn’t given a choice, but the look on his face during those inspired gatherings made it very clear what exactly he thought about spiritual enlightenment.
Bert was brave. He was a pushy, bat-shit crazy motherfucker, two years older then me and he was my very first of everything. First sleepover, first camping trip, first choir practise, first superhero movie, first kiss, first fuck, first cigarette, you name it. Every single time I discovered something new about the world, Bert was right there with me. It sounds weak when I say I loved him, although that’s part of the truth. The word doesn’t seem big enough to explain what we were.
He was the only person who could build me a universe that I didn’t feel guilty in. I’m not asking you to understand. He could kiss me and it would feel right and all the crap about eternal damnation and weakness and repenting faded into white noise and I could be me.
They sent us to camp the summer Bert turned eighteen. Re-ed.
The plan was we’d find our way back to God, see the error of our wicked ways and come back to impregnate a willing female.
Bert was out of there before the group leader had even finished introducing himself and the program. He got up, ran a hand through his shaggy hair, spit on the ground and stared the guy down. “Bullshit. This is fucking bullshit.”
He glanced over at me and I just sat there, frozen. I didn’t follow him when he left. If I still did regrets, that’d be one right there. As was, I tried going through with the denounce and repent.
They had these movies. Fuck the shiny pamphlets about eternal damnation and the speeches and the screaming; the movies are the real kicker. You get to watch free gay porn and that’s a plus, no two ways about it. You’re not even legal and there’s explicit stuff coming your way, so you get pretty excited, right?
At exactly that point, when you’re pretty much ready to rub up against the next tree for just a little friction, they inter-cut the hot blow-job scene or gang-bang or whathaveyou with images of crawling maggots and dying babies for dramatic effect.
Guys, let me tell you this fucks you up.
I got back from camp, nowhere near straight but definitely a lot more screwed up. The fact that someone somewhere had let slip where I’d spent my summer to a couple of people at high-school didn’t help. My class mates couldn’t even so much as look at me like I was a normal person after that.
I did what any lonely, self-loathing teenager would have done and escaped to the net, scrolling through pages and pages of images of ever more violent gay porn with one hand on my dick and maggots crawling over rotting flesh in my mind’s eye.
The day after I’d graduated, I got the hell out. Too little, too late, but I just couldn’t take any of it anymore, the way my mom’s smile had turned a little sad and a lot forced, the way that Minister who had never even tried looking for his own fucking son had taken to interviewing me about my sexual preferences outside the church on Sundays after the service, the guilt, the lies and the bullshit.
I knew exactly one person in the world who wouldn’t judge me and went off to find him. Bert hadn’t changed one bit. He didn’t ask questions, he didn’t comment, he just grinned and let me in. Ten minutes later, we were on the ratty mattress in the corner of the room fucking each other’s brain out.
Afterwards, we shared a cigarette, the silence between us familiar like the thick smoke hanging in the air and I remember watching his face, remember thinking how fucking much I’d missed him, remember trying to memorize every line, every shadow, just in case he’d suddenly be gone again.
He was gone already, in ways I hadn’t even dreamed of, even lying right there next to me, but I didn’t notice it. I was a seventeen year old Mormon kid, okay? I hadn’t a clue about smack. I didn’t think it was a big deal. I watched him in vague fascination as he inhaled the stuff from a piece of tinfoil, adding another premiere to my long list of firsts involving Bert McCracken.
This was just Bert doing his thing. Pushing boundaries for the hell of it, just to see if the guy up there would eventually strike him with a bolt of lightning. He didn’t. The Lord works in mysterious ways and all. Then again, maybe he’s just a sadistic bastard who enjoys torturing you until you’re begging for death, without safewords or pay cause he fucking owns the whole whore-house we call universe. Whatever, I should probably really not talk about religion, cause my bitterness and spite is going to lose me friends and alienate people, I just know it.
Anyway. That night, I believed this was happily ever after, which goes to show how much I didn’t know shit.
Bert’s descent into becoming a full-time junkie wasn’t as dramatic as the lifetime movie section would have you believe. There were no breakdowns and no broken promises, no failed attempts at getting clean. Bert was completely unapologetic about being on smack, the same way that a few years earlier, he’d been completely unapologetic about being a stoner. Addictions didn’t bother him in the least.
The fact that a serious drug habit really doesn’t work without adequate funds was what got me into hooking. I wish I could blame him for it, I wish I had at least resisted a little bit, but the reality of the situation is that I didn’t think it’d be a big deal.
We were gay, after all. We liked fucking. We were out and proud ex Mormon homosexuals and it seemed like a good idea at the time. No, I’m serious. We considered our options and came to the conclusion that subletting your ass for a couple of hours a week was preferable to working full-time for minimum wage. It really was that simple.
It took a little while to get into the swing of things, work out the specifics, but even that wasn’t all that difficult. We started by just chatting to guys online, dropping hints about fuel prices and that new pair of sneakers and how we were poor students, expanding and embellishing the stories as we went, reading snippets of aim conversations out to each other and laughing our asses off about each other’s bullshit.
I was a natural. I had lied so much to people that actually mattered to me that playing into some random online creep’s fantasy was easy. I was cute, barely legal and up for anything. Those Mormon movies and late-night web excursions had provided me with an excellent education on every aspect of gay sex that involved degradation and humiliation, the really twisted shit that you could charge ridiculous amounts of money for. I didn’t mind rough and I didn’t mind dirty.
Bert was having a harder time with the hooking, mostly because he was constantly bombed, but also cause the guy had looked a little scruffy to begin with and his appearance hadn’t improved over time, what with the unhealthy lifestyle choices.
It wasn’t like I minded doing most of the work. Back then, I was even a little proud of it, eager to prove to Bert that I wasn’t that stupid little innocent Mormon boy anymore, that I could play the fuck-the-establishment-game right along with him. Guys coming on my face and pissing in my mouth were living proof I had stopped thinking about hellfire and damnation, that I had moved on and up in the world.
I asserted my independence via double penetration, gags and gang-bangs. I fucked for freedom.
And yeah, I know, okay? Co-dependency issues and the desperate need for outside approval, terrible self-esteem, poor body image, all that jazz. Funny how none of it mattered when I came home after a job with my shirt sticking to the bloody welts on my back and Bert sat on that ratty mattress trailing fingers over guitar-strings with a small smile on his face. He’d look up, his eyes more or less glazed over, but he’d always look up and there was always a challenge in his gaze. I rose to it, every time, by smiling back at him.
I’m not saying it was right, I’m not saying it was healthy, but yeah, it was my choice. All the way. When we fucked, he told me how much hotter I was broken and bruised and it made me proud. He’d dig his nails into wounds until I screamed and I repaid him by tearing his hair out and biting at the marks the needles had left on his arms until they started bleeding.
In between rounds, we’d curl up and cuddle, watching cartoons and feeding each other cereal with milk dripping down our chins. We’d smear the walls of the apartment with finger-paints and rent movies we watched with the volume turned off, making up the dialogue to match the actor’s expressions, doubling over with laughter at some of the lines we came up with.
So there. This is what we had. This is what we were. This was life.
Until it suddenly wasn’t.
He died on the 4th of July 2008. Independence Day. I came back from a client with my throat fucked raw and my smile at the ready and he didn’t look up.
There are a lot of things I could say about this. The poetic irony of the date, how much he would have loved the timing of his final fuck-off, the way he almost looked like he was sleeping. I could bring on a stack of metaphors about my heart shattering and my soul being ripped apart, about my world ending on Independence Day with the National Anthem playing on TV.
You know what?
It’s not worth wasting my breath. There isn’t a chance in hell anyone out there will ever get what it felt like. Ever. And it really is that simple.
I stayed in the apartment for three days, curled up next to him. Talking, watching TV, trying to stuff cereal into his mouth, pressing the spoon to his lips and crying not because he was dead but because his stupid fucking mouth wouldn’t open.
I barely registered the two guys kicking down the door and the knife at my throat and I didn’t ask questions. I’d had no idea Bert had bought on credit. They got rid of the body and made it clear to me that they expected me to pick up Bert’s tab.
I’d been a whore long enough to know these people weren’t kidding when they told me they’d chain me up in a basement and just send guys in there until they’d gotten their money’s worth or until I died, whichever came first. I had no doubt whatsoever they’d make good on their promises.
I went back to work the next day.
I had nothing worth living for anymore, but I still went back and I never once even thought about offing myself. Not after I’d survived all this crap in the hope of a happily ever after that suddenly wasn’t. I’d been pissed on and shit on and beaten up till I bled, I’d been raped and broken a million times over and I’d tried to blow the corpse of my one true love after the rigor mortis had already started wearing off.
Stuff like that turns you into a resilient little shit, believe me.
The one thing I couldn’t deal with was the empty apartment. I slept on that ratty mattress in the corner of the room that smelled of death and decay for a little under a year after he'd gone and my dreams and night-time visions were haunted by blue broken hands and Bert’s laughter echoing in my head. In my nightmares, every single guy I’d ever hooked up with made an appearance and they all had his face.
I knew I’d either start putting the left-over syringes to a good use or I’d have to get the fuck out before I lost my mind.
You’ve heard the rest or at least parts of it. Jon minus the H (and oh hey, hello fucking irony), Ryan. Spencer. The present that’s blissfully ignorant about the past.